Bitter cherries

I watched Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry some months ago. It is a pretentious film,¹ redeemed only by its occasional playfulness, its detachment, and perhaps most importantly by its lead actor: Mr Badii, a middle-aged Persian, his face always bearing a hint of a smile which tells you he knows you are watching him and finds that fact amusing; a smile which, on any other occasion, you would have been angered by, had you not seen the man himself drowning in the quicksand of his disappointments; a smile, in short, which you reserve for strangers. But in Taste of Cherry we are not shown the plagues afflicted on Mr Badii, our Job; instead we see him almost glowing with beatitude, driving through the outskirts of Tehran. But then even this beatitude is an illusion.

I would probably forget this film a year from now, and all that I should remember would be the dizzying Persian landscapes where Mr Badii had vainly sought his saviour. But even the wastelands of Tehran, which seemed the perfect place on earth to be miserable and to contemplate suicide², would become, in my memories, indistinguishable from the arid and (to their protagonists at least) awe-inspiring Egyptian landscapes of Hollywood mummy films and Indiana Jones. Even more likely, it might become another dimension in the vague geographic nothingness I have created in my mind from years³ of careless reading: a place which is at once the Little Prince’s Sahara and Durrell’s Alexandria and Cervantes’s La Mancha; that is to say, nowhere at all. Perhaps this truck-infested nowhere would be none of these things.

But none of these bothered me: I didn’t care whether Kiarostami’s tricks were merited, whether they enhanced the film, or whether they were simply showmanship (or even Kiarostami’s way of showing his contempt for his audience, who were already deep in discussion even before the first frame). No, my concern was more primitive: why, I kept asking myself, did Mr Badii need someone to bury him in the first place? Was he afraid of the ravens?

Any student of literature would recognise Mr Badii immediately. He is Prufrock, contemplating his peach. He is at once both Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for a Godot they no longer cared to see. He is all of literature’s sad, old men, but it didn’t matter: to himself he was Mr Badii. Perhaps he is a bachelor; what did the facts matter? There are no women in his life—none that we know of at least—and Kiarostami even teasingly opens the film with him driving through a street filled with unemployed men, picking up boys for some seemingly shady purpose. One ignorant of Iran’s recent history would easily mistake the young Kurd soldier’s flightiness while talking to Mr Badii as being caused by the boy sensing something depraved in the man’s intentions. In fact he was afraid a passerby would see him and think he killed Mr Badii and was trying to get rid of the evidence by burying the man and the gun. And with the money on the car (that is, if Mr Badii was to be trusted) it would be harder to explain. He would be charged with murder and robbery. He would be imprisoned, or, more likely, he would be killed. Nobody would believe him even if he explained—especially if he explained.

But to the suicide again. It is already halfway through the film when Mr Badii’s intention is first revealed: he would kill himself; he needed someone to bury him. But why? It is never explained.

Has it anything to do with his religion, his beliefs? A conversation with an imam (whom he tried to bring into agreement by pressing the question of money) later in the film revealed that Mr Badii was not religious. He even seems to hold a certain grudge against God. But Kiarostami does not dwell on this. Was it propriety: did he think it a last act of charity to spare his neighbours the sight (and the smell) of his rotting corpse? Or did he not want to be remembered that way, rotting, his body bloated, the flesh eaten by worms? Was it pride, then? Perhaps it was pride.

Suicide is always a private and personal act, and the presence of anyone—even with an invitation—tarnishes this privacy. By his presence alone, this person becomes an accomplice in the act, himself an actor. Mr Badii didn’t want to commit suicide: he wanted to die, yes, but he was too cowardly⁵ or perhaps too cunning to think that it had to be a suicide. Mr Badii’s decision to die wasn’t pure and philosophical; it wasn’t born out of an impulse towards truth, a refusal to continue to live by the rules of the absurd. It was a selfish act, a compulsion from and a confession of guilt, and perhaps by forcing somebody else to witness his act (though in hindsight) he wished to pass the burden and thus absolve himself. After all, he still couldn’t convince himself that what he was about to do was right or justifiable. Mr Badii isn’t our pensive, reticent hero after all: in the sunset of dissolution we see instead a monster. I don’t think it matters whether he actually pulled the trigger.